Thread by @Gowhar_

Thread

1. Recently, there was this debate on CH regarding the influence of caste on marriages and what we can do to eradicate this menace from our society.

2. Castes in Kashmir have three basic types of origins

1. The ancestral place you belonged to
2. The profession of your ancestors
3. A nickname given to one of your ancestors

3. One of the main reasons why the caste system survives in any society is because its proponents derive its legitimacy from religion and whenever something has supposedly religious origins, we cannot question the practice.

4. Brahmins did it very well and controlled society for thousands of years. Which merits the question that if something is so abhorrent then why hasn’t society got rid of it?

5. Society, in the long run, tends to progress in a better way like we no longer see burglars being impaled at the city gates then why hasn’t this obnoxious practice been weeded out?

6. The answer has been provided by Ambedkar in his book Annihilation of caste. Hindus came up with gotras & sub-castes, so even if you belong to the lowest caste of Dalits, you all don’t belong to the same social hierarchy, within your caste you have a hierarchy of your own.

7. In short, you too get to look down upon someone else. And there are hundreds of these sub-sub-castes, so everyone gets a chance to feel superior to someone else.

8. Same applies to our Kashmiri society, our Brahmins are at the top but those that are supposedly beneath them have never agitated against this system bcz:

It derives its legitimacy from religion-we have been made to believe that questioning it would mean questioning religion.

9. No matter where you are placed in the social hierarchy, you too will have someone who you can look down upon and somehow feel superior.

10. Even if you belong to the lowest caste & there is no other caste beneath you, society has developed a separate coping mechanism for such individuals- they look down upon ppl belonging to villages, ppl belonging to villages look down upon ppl belonging to forests and so on.

11. When it comes to marriages, we have an adage “zatche che shooban zaett” ~ A rag looks good with rags only.

Like you don’t put a zaett (rag cloth) patch over a Makhmal (velvet) and vice-versa.

12. The question is that since the average household income has grown by manifolds and nobody uses paiwand (patches) anymore then why don’t we get a Makhmal for everyone?

Somebody in the debate postulated that inter-caste marriages should be promoted?!

Like, how?

13. Are you going to solicit caste before falling in love or are you going to instruct the matchmaker to bring only those potentials that belong to a caste lower than yours?

14. Because that is again doing the same thing but differently, you are again making a person aware of his/her social standing. The solution is to make castes irrelevant not promoting or impeding marriages based on caste.

15. Coming back to the legitimacy of upper castes. There are well-researched scientific papers that explain this fraud. Genetically speaking, the majority if not all of the so-called upper castes in the Sub-continent have no relation to Prophet!

16. The gene mapping of ‘Syed’ DNA in the subcontinent has shown that they are more related to people of Habbakadal than people of Hijaz.

researchgate.net/publication/22…

17. Male DNA has Y-chromosome that is inherited from the father and if the Shajr-e-Nasab theory was true then all the Y-chromosomes of all Syeds should have a lot of similarities and they should also be similar to Syeds of Arab because the ancestor is the same Y-chromosome.

18. The studies have shown that it is nothing but a myth. So, it is about time for a lot of people to come down their high horses.

19. Secondly, immediately after the death of the Prophet, a lot of false ahadees were circulated, a lot of sayings- even during the present time- are attributed to Prophet and his companions which is absolutely false.

20. It took scholars their entire lifetime of study to find isnad of ahadees and during this scrutiny they found the majority of these ahadees to be corrupt and false.

21. Within few centuries after Prophet’s death- people for came up with false sayings attributed to Prophet & it took years of perusal to differentiate right & wrong- so it would be safe to say that majority of those heirloom shajr-e-nasb are fictitious and cannot be corroborated

22. After Prophet, the 2nd-highest religious authority was that of sahaba which gave rise to castes such as Siddiqui, Farooqi, and Usmani.
Again, it is highly improbable that someone from their progeny would have come all across the mountains & decided to live here.

23. After Sahaba, it is the proximity to Awliya which is used to legitimize superiority of caste & this is a slippery slope in context of Kashmiri society.
Every caste coming from west of Kashmir is considered upper class, probably a deep-rooted inferiority complex at display.

24. The superiority is supposedly inherited by blood but in context of Awaliya, they don’t legitimize it by virtue of being descendants alone but also in virtue of being their disciples because many of these Awliya never set foot in Kashmir such as Abdul Qadir Jeelani and

25. Bahu din Naqashbandi the pioneers of Qadri and Naqashbandi surnames, some of them came just once and never again such as Mir Syed Ali Hamdani, while some of them never had any children such as Hamza Makhdhoomi.

26. No doubt they were great people who have done immense service to the propagation of Islam but just like the majority of their Karamaat were works of fiction, the claims of being descendent and disciples are fictitious accounts as well.

27. Apparently, these guys performed certain miracles that neither our Prophet nor any of his sahaba were able to perform but that is a debate for another day.

28. One of the common things between all the ‘upper’ caste people who came to Kashmir from West or whose origins ‘trace back’ to Prophet was that all of them were literate, could read, write, and interpret texts in a >95% illiterate society- rest I leave to your understanding.

29. In Islam, there is neither any transfer of responsibility nor any transfer of divinity, Prophet Ibraham’s father and Prophet Noah’s son both died in a state of kufr– the son or the father couldn’t make them heed to the divine message.

30. If relation to Prophet somehow makes us superior then all of us are at least Prophet’s cousins through our great-grandfather Prophet Adam.